Close call.

Indie rockers, The New Pornographers, almost sullied squeaky clean college life at a Christian liberal arts school but were stymied by the quick-thinking efforts of administrators who saw through their shenanigans. 

Just what were The New Pornographers trying to do? Well, play a show of course. It’s not the music they were peddling that was the problem. It was their name. According to The Onion’s AV Club,

Naughty, filthy Canadian perverts The New Pornographers were foiled in their attempt to ply their salacious brand of indie-rock sleaze at Grand Rapids, Michigan’s Calvin College—which describes itself as a “Christian liberal arts school”—with school officials canceling an upcoming Oct. 15 concert because “after weeks of discussion and consideration, the irony of the band’s name was impossible to explain to many.”

For anyone who’s heard The New Pornographers (and I’m a fan, personally), it would be a stretch to call their music sexy, let alone pornographic. Still, the message conveyed by booking the band was that the school – and the band itself – endorsed pornography. In one of the more down-trodden “I cannot believe we have to release this statement” statements likely released by a student campus group, anywhere, the Student Activities Office had this to say,

“The Student Activities Office regrets the way this has happened. We regret the message we have sent to the band and their fans with this cancellation, and any confusion this has caused generally.”

This is just one more example of how utterly terrifying human sexuality remains for those committed to pretending it doesn’t exist.